Kathryn Smith Mines Gold Nuggets from Vintage Diaries

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

Kathryn Smith has added another category to her long writing resume, that of diarist.

Smith, a former newspaper reporter and editor, and author of a number of books, including “The Gatekeeper,” the first biography of FDR’s private secretary Marguerite A. LeHand (who is widely believed to have served as the de facto White House Chief of Staff), and “Baptists and Bootleggers and Methodists and Moonshiners,” is now publishing a daily column online following the day-by-day diary entries of vintage journals kept by ordinary people.

Every day Smith writes a summary of an entry from diaries she has collected. The work is published on her substack here.

She said the study of the diaries has offered enlightening views of how Americans lived in the era covering the 1920s-1940s.